Stable Channel

The Stable channel should be used by production clusters. Versions of CoreOS are battle-tested within the Beta and Alpha channels before being promoted. At the time of writing, the current version is CoreOS 410.0.0.

Alpha Channel

The alpha channel closely tracks master and is released to frequently. The newest versions of docker, etcd and fleet will be available for testing. At the time of writing, the current version is CoreOS 435.0.0.

Make sure to replace YOUR_PUBLIC_KEY_HERE with your actual public key, it will begin with ssh-rsa....

Additional reading can be found at Booting CoreOS with iPXE and Embedded scripts for iPXE.

Using Cloud-Config

Please be sure to check out Using Cloud-Config.

In particular, note that the $private_ipv4 and $public_ipv4 variables are only supported on Vultr if you have the ‘cloud-config-url’ option set on your kernel command line.

Without this option, you will need to hard code these values into your cloud-config file.

Create the VPS

Create a new VPS (any server type and location of your choice), and then:

For the “Operating System” select “Custom”.

Select iPXE boot.

Set the chain URL to the URL of your script http://example.com/script.txt. Note that the URL must be plain old HTTP, not HTTPS.

Click “Place Order”.

Once you receive the welcome email the VPS will be ready to use (typically less than 2-3 minutes).

Accessing the VPS

You can now log in to CoreOS using the associated private key on your local computer. You may need to specify its location using -i LOCATION. If you need additional details on how to specify the location of your private key file see here.

SSH to the IP of your VPS, and specify the “core” user: ssh core@IP

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$ssh core@IP

The authenticity of host'IP (2a02:1348:17c:423d:24:19ff:fef1:8f6)'can'tbe established.

Using CoreOS

Now that you have a cluster bootstrapped it is time to play around.

CoreOS is currently running from RAM, based on the loaded image. You may want to install it on the disk. Note that when following these instructions on Vultr, the device name should be /dev/vda rather than /dev/sda.